“It’s still pretty ugly.” Mateo patted her on the back, to make up for his comment.
“I always found it charming, from the day I arrived here with my suitcase to come live with Forcás. Before that, I had never come. I had no idea where in the city his hideout cave was.”
“But didn’t we just leave it that the two of you were breaking up, never to see each other again?”
“About a month and a half after that, we made up. He had looked me up to tell me that he had broken it off with his old love. I broke it off with mine with a long phone call from a public telephone, and a few days later we had already decided to live together. I said goodbye to Sandrita and the apartment on Deán Funes, packed my suitcase, and showed up knocking at his door, 121. It was the same exact door you see now, metal, with this same oxidized mustard color. I rang the bell. Very emotional as you can imagine, startled, really, not really knowing where I was and what I was doing.”
Her worries vanished as soon as Forcás opened the door. He was in an undershirt and sandals and was drinking a maté, and she liked that. He looked like a neighborhood kid. He didn’t smell like sheep’s wool, nor like Drakkar Noir, but like that instead, an everyday kid, wearing sandals and drinking a maté in his neighborhood. It was the first time that she had seen him like that. Before, she had always seen him in some role, as a resistance fighter, or as director, or the handsome one, or an Argentinean, or a boyfriend. But now it was just the face of an ordinary young man, who smiled as he opened the door of an ordinary house in an ordinary barrio, who took her suitcase and asked her to come in. She sensed that the moment was important. It was something like landing in a normal life, or as much of a normal life as could have existed amid the general horror. It was also like stepping into the real Buenos Aires. For Aurelia, Coronda was the doorway into the city.
“It’s not the same being in a city as stepping into it, Mateo. For example, you and I, in our hotel, we’re in Buenos Aires, but we are not. At the apartment on Deán Funes I was in Buenos Aires, but not fully. But in Coronda it was different; Coronda was the real Buenos Aires, the city within the city, the heart. And it’s not really a metaphor. Caballito is in the middle of Buenos Aires and Coronda is in the heart of Caballito. Or who knows, that’s what they say. What is definite is that Coronda was my citizenship papers; as soon as I stepped into that house, I stopped being a foreigner.”
Forcás introduced her to his two cats, Abra and Cadabra, a pair of ashen little things, barely alive, blade thin from hunger. A few days prior, he had found them in the vacant lot across from the convent, among the garbage from the market, where someone had abandoned them in a sack. They were half dead when he took them in.
“But they were already fine when you arrived?” Mateo noted with a touch of anxiety. He couldn’t stand the thought of an animal suffering.
“They were starting to come back, thanks to some mineral water that Forcás fed them with a syringe. After he introduced me to his cats, he showed me the house.”
“From now on it’s our house,” Forcas had told her. But he didn’t tell her that it was also his brother Miche’s, and his girlfriend Azucena’s. That part Aurelia would find out that night.
The entrance to the room was through the small patio, which had a few potted plants, and Forcás showed her the washbasin and a rope ladder that led to the roof and that, he explained with hand signals, he had put there as a means of escape should it become necessary to do so. They ducked to go under the clothesline and Aurelia was shown the bathroom, a stream of water that came out of a piece of pipe and splashed on the floor, in a space so narrow that, she would find out the next day, on showering you had to watch that your back didn’t graze the cold wall.
Aurelia wasn’t exactly sure why, but she had the sensation of coming upon a cozy place. Or she did know why, the reason was clear as day: this was a real house, with potted plants and cats and clothes hanging on the line, something unexpected for someone like Forcás, who lived on the razor’s edge. Before further exploring her new refuge, Aurelia locked herself in the bathroom, to be alone for a minute and think about what was happening to her.
“You didn’t lock yourself in there to think, Lolé, but to pee, to mark your territory. That’s what animals do when they take over a place.”
Forcás later showed her the bedroom and she found it stupendous. There were a few books, those that could pass as innocent, Dickens, Kipling, and Stevenson, and a Ken Brown sound system, and a bunch of rock nacional records. The lone bed was simple, with a blanket of black-and-coffee-colored stripes. Forcás told her that it had been hand-knitted by the Aymaras and had been a present from some Bolivian comrades. This is my bed, he said to her, your bed now as well. She sat beside him and laughed, because it was really a narrow bed. A double bed would have been too big, for the room was no larger than thirty square meters. Aside from the bed, there was a table and four chairs, a stove in the corner, and a fridge whose door was held in place by a rope. Stacked against the wall were countless boxes with the name Yiwu YaChina on them. It would be much better without the boxes, she thought, but said nothing.
“Yiyu China?” Mateo asked.
“Yiwu YaChina. A wholesale Chinese jewelry. It was Forcás’s minute. To the neighbors, he was the wholesaler for Yiwu YaChina.”
“Boxes full of jewels! That must have cost a fortune …”
“They were Chinese jewels, kiddo, cheap fake stuff. The boxes were covered in dust, anybody would be able to tell that the merchandise wasn’t moving. But it was his minute. As soon as your father took out a box, he replaced it with another one, and so he kept the neighbors from suspecting.”
From outside on the street, Mateo wanted to look inside the window, hopping up, but he came up short.
So he brought over some bricks from the abandoned lot, stacked them, and stood on top of them, putting his hands on the sides of his face to block the reflection on the glass.
“What do you see?” Lorenza asked from below.
“It’s empty. No one lives here.” Mateo jumped down to the sidewalk.
“If you want, I can ring the bell, kiddo, see if we can talk with some of the neighbors, someone who knew your father. I can say that we lived here a long time ago. Maybe they have keys and we can go in the room, so what if it’s empty. Or better yet, maybe it’s for rent and they’ll show it.”
“You go ahead. I’m going to see what they have in the market.”
“Let’s go together. But tell me what you saw through the window, if the floor has greenish tiles like I remember—”
“I don’t know, I couldn’t tell.”
“Wait for me here. I want to look.” Lorenza went back to the window, added a few bricks to the stack, climbed up on top, and a few moments later was looking for Mateo in the market.
“The floor is green, kiddo!” she screamed at him when she saw him down an aisle. “A milky green, veined with white.”
“Great news,” he laughed. “Veined with white.”
The day Lorenza had arrived for the first time, the floor tiles had recently been mopped with lavender water. The whole place smelled like lavender, because Forcás had just cleaned to welcome her. And he had cleared a couple of shelves above the records and told her she could put her clothes there as he helped her unpack. It was a whole big moving-in ceremony, and although they didn’t mention it, it was clear that it was a solemn occasion for both of them.
“I saw the patio,” Mateo said, checking out the slabs of meat on the counter. “You could see all the way out back. Small, smaller than I had imagined.”
“We did everything on that tiny patio,” Lorenza said. “Even roasted meat on Sundays during the summer. Miche had hung a mirror on the back wall, right between the potted plants that we used to comb our hair. And since there wasn’t a sink inside, we washed pots, dishes, and clothes in the basin, as well as cleaned our hands and brushed our teeth. In the winter you had to be quick about it; funny to have to wear a coat to brush your teeth.”